Joining the online world

Hello everyone, just a quick post to let you know that my website is up and running!

It is entirely designed and built by myself so I hope you like it. It is not quite finalised yet; I will be making a few minor changes over the coming weeks but overall I am very happy with the main design. It may be down for short periods during this time while I perfect it.

Please feel free to take a look: www.moonlightimaging.co.uk

Although almost all of my time over the last week or two has been spent getting my website up and running, I have still managed to take a few photos.

This particular shot of two Goosander (honest!) silhouetted against snow clouds was taken about five minutes walk from where I was designing my website in Nottingham University's Biological Photography Department. It is proof that, given the right conditions, an interesting photograph can be taken anywhere and that taking breaks even in busy periods can be productive.

The same is true of the Grey Heron Below.

Bejewelled Waterfalls

Three weekends ago (What? You didn't expect my blog to be up to date did you?) myself and a few friends embarked upon a two day roadtrip to Gretna Service Station. At first glance this fairly typical refueling stop seems to offer little to the nature photographer, but come dusk a wheeling ballet of millions of starlings fills the sky.

At least this is what usually happens. We arrived right on schedule fresh from a day in the Yorkshire dales to find Gretna basking in the last rays of sunshine emanating from a cloudless sky; the perfect conditions. Unfortunately, to our surprise, the starlings were not playing ball. There were certainly plenty around but for no apparent reason for the most part they were content to stay in small darting flocks.

After one or two fairly underwhelming shots the show was over and we retired to our hotel.

The next day we headed back to Nottingham stopping off in the lakes for a dose of landscape photography. Sam Waldron and I stopped at Raise Beck, a stream on Dunmail Raise between Thirlmere and Grasmere.

All the rocks, trees, and anything else within splash-range of the stream were coated in glistening ice creating a treacherous but very beautiful labyrinth. After a short while of attempting to find iceless paths up the gorge I realised the only way to find grip was to stand in the non-frozen parts of the stream, allowing the ice-cold water to flow into my boots.

One particularly dazzling part of the spectacle was a tree leaning over and partially into a waterfall. Every one of its bows was adorned with countless icicles, each two or three foot long. Unfortunately, the base of the tree was unaccessible but I still managed one or two shots looking down at it.

So what tips do I have for shooting frozen waterfalls?

1) Metering; constantly check your histogram! The combination of white ice and water and black rocks provides quite a task for camera sensors. I had to keep checking the histogram to make sure I was neither blowing the highlights or underexposing shadows.

2) Use a polarising filter. This cuts the reflections out of the water allowing you to see through to the rocks below. It also cuts out enough light to allow exposures long enough to blur the water.

3) Take a lens cloth. When shooting low near waterfalls it is almost impossible to prevent splashes hitting the lens. Keep checking the front of the lens for water drops and mop them up as soon as they occur.

4) Make sure your tripod is as steady as possible. Be very careful if the tripod leg is in water; it may appear steady but the water may be buffeting it.

5) Keep warm!

All Quiet on the Blog Front

Just a very quick blog post today to apologise for not posting for the past day or two. I am currently working on a website (www.moonlightimaging.co.uk) that will soon replace and include this blog. I hope it will be worth waiting for!

Below are two screenshots two wet your appetite. The first shows my home page.

The second shows the (incomplete) mammals gallery.

Play Makes Perfect

Humans learn most during their life in the period when they are most playful. Coincidence? I think not. Research shows that play teaches us vital knowledge about the way the world works and homes our problem solving skills as well as the relatively mundane fact that it teaches us about the game we are playing.

In a similar way experimenting with photographs we would not normally take increases our skill in all areas of photography. Experimentation teaches us more about our cameras and about properties of types of light we may one day encounter.

Take for example yesterday in Sherwood Forest. The afternoon light was too flat for me to take the types of photograph I normally thrive upon (I now know this was because of a build up of cloud cover before an evening snow storm). Instead of despairing I decided to experiment with a few panning shots to try and bring out the colours of the winter woodland whilst blurring out the ordered distractions of an overly-managed woodland.

Hopefully I not only got a few interesting shots but learned a few things in the process that will help my photography in the future. I guess it is too early to tell.

This evening I decided to play with another type of photography I rarely dabble in; physiograms. Physiograms are long-exposure photographs showing the regular patterns produced by the swing of pendulums.

My method of producing physiograms involves suspending a laser pen from the roof by string in a darkened room, setting it going with the camera on bulb, and waiting until the pendulum has come to an almost complete halt. It really is very simple and I would recommend anyone tries it

Subtly different configurations of string produce markedly different patterns, as does swinging the pen in different directions. Without mathematics incomprehensible to my poor biologist mind it is impossible to predict the final pattern until the exposure is complete.

Not only have I hopefully learned something applicable to Nature Photography from this experiment (I have no idea what!) and had a great deal of fun, but this also shows that biology does not have a monopoly on natural beauty. The combination of simple mathematical and physical laws can produce equally surprising and beautiful phenomena.

A Lesson from the Book of Avatar

As this is a big block of text I have added some largely irrelevant (none HDR!!!) images to this post to jazz it up a little.

In all areas of life, be it politics, business, your personal life, or photography, it is advisable to stand back, look at what you are doing, look at what others are doing, regroup, and see if your own actions can be improved.

A case and point, shamelessly stolen from Stephen Fry and QI, is China and the Teacup. Because China invented china and the teacup so early in its history, they had no need other liquid-holding devices. It was not until Europeans arrived with glass that they had access to glass, and therefore telescopes, windows, and microscopes. If they had been able to compare their technologies with those of the Europeans earlier, they would almost certainly have utilised technologies such of glass and the course of human history would have been very different. The same is true of the Europeans; it took 400 years for gunpowder technology to filter through Asia and the Middle East before reaching Europe.

In a similar way photographers can learn from other arts and the way they use new methods and technology. Take for example the film world, and more specifically Avatar. Avatar has already snatched the crown of "highest grossing film of all time" from Titanic. As photographers it is useful to ask why Avatar is such a success and whether lessons can be learned from its success. To do this I simply popped onto the "critical response" section of Wikipedia's Avatar page.

Perhaps the most telling review quote is from Robert Ebert's Chicago Sun Times review of Avatar. Robert is quoted as saying "watching Avatar, I sort of felt the same as when I saw Star Wars in 1977. Like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, the film employs a 'new generation of special affects'." However, I think it takes more than a new brand of special effects to make a successful film; it is all in how the special effects are employed. Avatar was released simultaneously in 2D and 3D and although I saw it in 3D I am fairly sure it would still work as a film in 2D.

Without the effects, without the 3D and the razzmatazz, Avatar still works as a film. It still has a working plot, well developed characters, and moral lessons. These work so well and the 3D is so subtle and believable that while watching it I often forgot I was watching a 3D film. I am sure some of the 3D effects will look dated and cheesy in five years time but I am confident that it will be remembered as not only a technologically groundbreaking film but as a great film in its own right. In short, the makers of Avatar did not produce a film in 3D simply because the technology was available, they produced a great film where the technology was the icing on the cake.

How then does this relate to photography? The world of photographic technology is rapidly advancing. The hardware and software wizards keep coming out with new advances such as high dynamic range (HDR), an editing technique that allows photographers to merge together many different exposures of a high-contrast scene to produce an image where the tones are correct throughout the image.

Many HDR photographs seem to me to be taken because the photographer could not work out a way to record a beautiful scene in any other way. One of the first lessons I learned when trying landscape photography for the first time is that there is a big difference between a beautiful scene and a photogenic scene. Luckily for the millions arriving at the grand canyon every year, these two categories overlap; however, often they do not. By using HDR to try and make a beautiful scene photogenic the result is often an unbelievable post-apocalyptic cartoony feast of colours and tones that detracts from the scene itself. Perhaps this is still art but it is not photography.

I have nothing against HDR itself, just the way it is usually used. If used subtly such that it is not immediately obvious that it has even be used, HDR has the potential to be like Avatar's 3D effects; subtle enough such that it is not immediately obvious but pronounced enough to give high-contrast photographs of photogenic scenes a little kick. HDR can be used to make a photograph that tells 1000 words tell just a few more.

With this in mind, when the next big technological advance hits the shelves I hope photographers will ask how the technology can improve their photographs and not delve too deeply into the technological geekery involved to find out what is feasible, regardless of whether it improves the message of their photographs.